The film has not yet been released, and it has caused an uproar in the United States that its director Scorsese did not expect. Many religious organizations have issued statements, advertised and even held demonstrations in protest. Some organizations called on the believers to boycott Universal’s parent company MCA and its subsidiaries, and boycott all theaters showing the film. A pastor of the American-Israeli American Council and the head of the American Family Association sent out 2.5 million letters of protest and planned to advertise on hundreds of Christian radio and television stations in response to this insulting work of the Christian holy scripture. Although Universal tried various ways to premiere the movie ahead of time, and to invite relevant people to mediate in the religious world, and even let Scorsese be interviewed by a TV station to affirm his religious piety, but the results were minimal. After the film was released, the wave of protests spread across the ocean to the European continent. In October of that year, an explosion occurred at a theater in Paris, which killed dozens of people. During the Venice Film Festival, someone accused the film of contempt for the national religion. The famous Italian director Zeferelli said that if the film entered the competition, he would withdraw from the festival, which made the film only be shown as an observation film. The anger of the people is, of course, the distortion and blasphemy of the image of Jesus in the film. This seems reasonable. According to the "Bible", Jesus was conceived by the Holy Virgin Mary, the Son of God, and his savior sent to the world. He began to realize his sacred mission at the age of 16, traveling around preaching, spreading the gospel of God and the kingdom of heaven, and finally was nailed to the cross to redeem the world, resurrected three days later, and ascended into the kingdom of heaven. In the Christian culture and even the secular civilization of the West, he is a sacred and glorious figure.
However, in this film, although Scorsese also showed the miracles of Jesus and his identity as the Son of God based on the "Bible", the audience could not help but feel that the idol in people's minds, Jesus, is more like in most of the film. It is a common man who is in the midst of all living beings. He is cowardly and hesitant by nature. Although he feels vaguely in his heart that he will be selected to complete the sacred mission given by God, he dare not take on this important task. He was full of contradictions and even nasty thoughts; he frankly admitted that he was a liar and hypocrite, and claimed that he wanted to resist God but had no courage. In fact, he couldn't even distinguish between God and the devil, and he was hesitant about what God's will was. In the Bible, Magdalene, the devout female believer and witness to the resurrection of Jesus, was written as a prostitute and later became the wife of Jesus; the well-known traitor Judas became a devout believer and continued to help Jesus strengthen his martyrdom. belief. His betrayal of Jesus was said to be following the will of Jesus. What is particularly difficult to tolerate is that Jesus, who was nailed to the cross, was tempted by the devil, abandoned his mission, stepped off the cross, and coveted the life of mortals with children. The scene of Jesus having sex with Magdalene in the middle made some viewers more reverent, and then Jesus and Mary sisters drew on each other, and the content of living together violated the doctrine of Christianity. It should be said that Scorsese was not surprised by this response. Although Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin had already made non-Christian descriptions of the world, even in the history of Western cinema, Buñuel turned Jesus and his disciples into a group in the "Last Supper" in "Biridiana". A triumphant beggar, Bergman of Sweden has also expressed doubts and disrespect to God, but people still cannot accept such apostasy in an "official history" about Jesus.
In fact, people should calmly understand Scorsese's creative intentions. Although Scorsese, who was born in a Catholic family and wanted to be a priest since childhood, and the devout Protestant Schrader chose Kazantzakis’ grotesque novels as the blueprint, they did break away from Christianity in their creations. They deviated from the "Bible" with its challenging distortions, but it should be said that they had no intention of belittling Jesus or attacking the gods. They are just borrowing the traditional sacred image of Jesus to explore a hero in their minds. In other words, they are not trying to re-understand this legendary idol in the classic culture from a human perspective, and rebuild it with their own life as the background. A myth about "heroes". In this sense, this film can also be said to be an epic about man growing into a god.
It is not difficult to see that the Jesus in the film is indeed not the superman of the flesh and goddess in the "Bible", but he is not a mundane man full of carnal sensuality. At the beginning of the film, the Jesus shown to us is an image full of pain and inner contradiction (which obviously makes him surpass the common man). Next, we see the scene that set the tone of the film's visual and content: the haggard Jesus, carrying a huge cross on his back, walked in agony amid people's misunderstanding and criticism. It should be said that the bold "reading" of Jesus in the film lies not only in his later walking down the cross and living a mundane life, but more importantly, the depiction of Jesus' hesitation, hesitation and inner pain throughout the film. According to Scorsese's understanding, the inner anxiety of Jesus is not only the weakness of courage and will, that is, it is not only from the side of "action", but the deep pain comes from the anxiety of "knowledge." From the words of Jesus who woke up from a nightmare in the film, we know that the worry that plagued Jesus from the beginning of the film was that he could not tell whether the voices that kept calling him in the dark came from God or the devil. It should be said that this worry about "truth" is exactly the core of the character of Jesus that Scorsese wanted to create. In the film, Jesus is constantly hesitating about what the truth belongs to God and whether he has the truth. After he rescued Magdalene, when he was about to preach, he suddenly felt hesitated ("What if I say wrong?"), and when John the Baptist told him that love is not the only instruction from God, he even more to himself The sensed truth was shaken. In the desert he successfully resisted all the temptations, but he did not really hear the voice of God (instead, a sharp axe and blood-stained John came to convey the will of God). When Jesus returned to his disciples and learned that John had been killed by Herod, he gave up the creed that God is love and declared, "I believed in love, but now I believe in this (hate)". After that, Jesus seemed decisive and confident. He began to declare that he was the son of God, performing miracles along the way, dismissing the mockery of the people of his hometown, and even denying his biological mother, and he had the spirit of sacrificing everything for the truth. In front of the Temple in Jerusalem, he declared that he was the King of Judea. However, when everyone was emotional and asked him to order the destruction of the temple, Jesus fell back into doubts about whether God advocated love or hate. He wanted to hear God's instructions again to confirm his actions, but he failed to do so. In fact, we can see later that Jesus returned to the wandering toward love and the denial of hatred. When Judas brought soldiers to catch Jesus, a disciple swung a sword and cut off a soldier’s ear. Jesus immediately stopped him and said the famous motto: “Take the sword Must be hurt by the sword. "In the most controversial passage in which Jesus was tempted, we could have clearly seen the confusion of Jesus’ “knowledge” expressed by Scorsese. Such as removing the human content from this story (yes It’s not difficult to see that Jesus was tempted by mistakenly thinking that it was an instruction from God. His later mixed residence with Mary and Sister Mart was also misled by the false angel (she told Jesus, God says that a woman is a person with a thousand faces.) Therefore, even though he had indulged in the mundane and even chaotic worldly life, once he learned the true intentions of God, he resolutely “returned” to the cross (given that the temptation was dealt with by the director as Jesus’ Hallucinations, the "return" here means that Jesus wakes up from the illusion).
So far, from the confusion in Jesus' heart, we can not only see a "distorted" image of Christ, but it is also not difficult to read the half-hidden and half-represented Scorsese behind Jesus. The Jesus in the film is undoubtedly a hero in the eyes of Scorsese, and even the incarnation of some kind of god. It's just that he is not only a popular hero from man to god, but also a tragic contemporary urban hero in Scorsese's mind-an incarnation of a modern intellectual who is constantly exploring in hesitation and hesitation. The kind of confusion that Jesus expressed in the film about "knowledge" is exactly the problem faced by many contemporary Western intellectuals. The temptation of Jesus also reflects the pain of their hesitation in the world. Therefore, it is true that as Scorsese himself said, he just wanted to understand Jesus from a human perspective, but in fact the charm of the film did not only come from the fact that he pulled the god in traditional culture—Jesus—towards Man’s dissolution of traditional myths, on the contrary, we might as well say that its core lies in the fact that Scorsese recasts a modern myth about gods or heroes from his own life experience.
Scorsese is also an explorer full of pain and even temptation. The descendant of this Italian who had planned to devote his life to religion finally failed to withstand the temptation of the movie and became a Hollywood player. A leader. However, although he converted to the Hollywood empire, he still seemed to be willing to surrender to the Hollywood system. Starting from "Alice No More Lives Here", he shocked the film world with a series of masterpieces, and thus is regarded as one of the most individual directors in the Hollywood film industry. On the other hand, although Scorsese continues to use his films to reveal the dark corners of American life and express his unique feelings about American life as an outsider, he can also be said to have always been a shaper of American heroes. . In "Taxi Driver", he portrayed a freak hero in contemporary American society who may become a social disaster (assassin In "The Bull", he reveals a Rocky hero and the brutality and barbarism in the American culture that created this hero. In addition, there is the young man in "The King of Comedy" who made all kinds of crazy actions to become a man of the world... There is no doubt that these "heroes" brought more disappointment to Scorsese. It can also be seen in the more realistic depiction of the underworld figures in his later filmed "Good Companion". But when making this film, Scorsese obviously has not given up his "hero dream". He began to look for a hero who truly belonged to him in the ancient and self-experienced life. From his first reading of Kazantzakis's novel in 1973 to several subsequent revisions of the script, Jesus in the film has obviously been reshaped into an image that meets his ideals. Although the Paramount company that originally planned to make this film suddenly changed his mind before the start of the film, and Scorsese had already compromised and suppressed the cost, but he never gave up this plan, and finally took the Jesus-like approach in his film. The spirit nailed itself to the cross. Although this film did not become the culmination of Scorsese's film career, it undoubtedly occupies an extremely important position in its creation and in the history of world cinema.
It should be said that Scorsese also showed his new exploration in the artistic style of the film. Most of Scorsese's films are set in the city, and he is good at combining his sensitivity to light and shadow, the display of darkness, and excellent lens movement and editing to create a very glamorous film segment. In his narrative method, he masters the patterns and factors in various types of films in the United States, and often blends different types together, without submerging his own personality and partial rewriting style in the exciting story narration. In this film, Scorsese strives to establish a new model. He did not transfer the Hollywood-style luxurious and spectacular historical film style to this early AD story. On the contrary, the film went from setting, props and even Characters are portrayed in an extremely simple way. The relatively limited background and few spectacular scenes constitute a heroic epic. The film's narration and the use of lens seek to combine a more realistic style with the creation of metaphor and the atmosphere of the picture, so as to form a rhythm and atmosphere consistent with the psychological history of the characters. The portrayal of Jesus with high-key light and several shocking bloody shots that have appeared in the film many times highlight the pain that Jesus experienced in his heart and Scorsese’s consistent vigorous style. .
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